A concept has developed in teaching and in presentation of audio programs for informative purposes which facilitates the location and identification at various portions of the program without the necessity of having to reproduce and listen to the entire program. It can be readily envisioned how difficult it is to try and locate one portion of an entire taped presentation or written article without any adequate means for determining where in the transcript the desirable portion might be. This is often true when dealing with a situation where time is of the essence or the listener or reader is only interested in one small portion of a presentation.
Audio programs of information and for teaching purposes have been found to be very useful in the professional world. For example, doctors are constantly interested in the latest documentation in their field and are constantly looking for ways to be kept up-to-the-minute on latest developments. Often they have limited time in which to read or listen to the latest informative material and are readily receptive to means for recognizing and identifying segments or portions of a program with which they are primarily concerned.
One system to facilitate the presentation and acceptance of program material of this type is a system which has been effectively used with written presentations. A brief caption or synopsis is presented before a longer written portion of the program so that the reader may read the synopsis at a glance and determine whether or not he is interested in reading the longer more detailed portion which follows. Periodically a synopsis appears during the written presentation and the reader can skim through the presentation by reading each synopsis thereby getting a general picture of the content of the document. Additionally, should any synopsis interest him specifically, he can read the following more detailed presentation after the synopsis to get a fuller picture. In this manner, a reader, such as a doctor, can skim entire articles in a short period of time to find points of interest which can be read in greater detail.
It is envisioned that this type of synopsis approach would be helpful in connection with recorded presentations where the listener could skim the recorded tape presentation by merely listening to a series of brief synopsis periodically positioned along the tape in order to skim the recorded program and, if desired, to choose particular portions of the program for detailed listening. There is no known system for recorded presentations which employs synopses or abstracts to segment the recorded portion so that the entire tape may be skimmed in a rather short period of time and various portions of the entire program can be pin-pointed for purposes of more detailed study should the listener so desire. Naturally, for effective operation, the system must be one which identifies the synopsis or abstract portions from the longer more detailed portions and one which controls the presentation to the listener so that he is aware of the differentiation between abstracts and detailed portions of the tape and is restricted in the manner in which he listens to the taped program.